


true love hurts (this could almost kill me)

by Murf1307



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bigender Alex Summers, Canonical Character Death, Darwin Lives, Depressed Darwin, Fix-It, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Reference to Canonical Failed Suicide Attempt, Reunions, Stonewall Riots (minor), Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 05:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8831746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Murf1307/pseuds/Murf1307
Summary: How, after falling apart, gravity slowly brings Alex Summers and Armando Muñoz back together.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so, some notes:
> 
> \- Edi Gathegi stated that he played Darwin with Darwin's canon background. So yeah, in the comics, Darwin has a suicide attempt in his background. I haven't gotten into Darwin's emotional state in fics as much as I should, but it comes up here.  
> \- Bigender Alex Summers is like, my most favorite headcanon. So here it is.  
> \- I'm back, guys, I know it's been a while. But I'm back.

Alex spends the first month denying that it could be what it is, that Darwin could be dead, or that it may be his fault. _He asked me to cover him_ rattles around his head, wraps around him, too-tight and hollow.

After that, the guilt sets in. It gets worse after Cuba. He thinks that somehow, if Darwin were still here, things would be different, would be better.

He doesn’t spiral, the way Charles does. He doesn’t throw himself into work, like Hank does. He and Sean loll around the house like cast-off shell casings. Alex can feel the violence clinging to his bones, echoing in his chest where the energy lives.

The tragedies keep coming: Kennedy. The War. Sean.

He doesn’t have anything left but this house, an expunged juvenile felony record, and Charles and Hank.

He might as well be totally alone.

So he leaves. Middle of the night. Hank’s down in his lab, Charles is asleep via intoxicant, but he tries to be as quiet and blank as possible anyway.

Down, down to Manhattan he goes. It’s the place to be, no matter who or what you are, it seems. He goes south, down through Harlem, to the Upper West Side, to Midtown, to Soho, to the Village.

The years spin by.

—

The first month after he comes back to life, all Armando can feel is regret. There are seven years missing, and there’s a war on. Not Shaw’s war, true enough, but still a war.

But there’s a space in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly, if that makes any sense. Something bigger, grander, that’s been lost.

And it feels urgent to find it again.

For a while he pretends he doesn’t know what it is, because it’s hard to let yourself want something so bad it leaves an empty, aching space where your heart should be.

The world will hate him if he loves you, says the dark voice in the back of his head, the same voice that told him to jump off that rooftop when he was sixteen. Do you really want to put him through that? He’s already suffered enough.

But the thing is — he knows that even if those things are objectively true, they don’t mean anything if he finds Alex.

They’re his mind’s excuse to make him suffer more.

The boarding school psychiatrist called it depression. And even if that’s a diagnosis that makes sense — it is — there’s nothing really the doctors could do. After all, shouldn’t the Amazing Evolving Boy have adapted out of something like that?

Apparently not.

—

1969\. The world’s not so different from how it was in 1962. Not different enough, not where it counts. People still kill each other for who they are, where they’re from.

They still kill each other over ideas.

Some ideas, Alex thinks, are worth dying for. But he’s not sure any are worth killing for. So he takes his place on the edges of anti-war protests, fights cops when he has to, and never, ever, ever lets the world see the burning weapon lodged in his ribs, behind his sternum. Where a heart would fit perfectly, if he still had one.

He thinks, privately, that 1962 burned it out of him.

—

Armando swings down to the Village one night in late June. He’s driving taxis again, and a fare wanted to come down here, a shaky, scared redheaded girl looking for somewhere to call home.

He knows how that looks on people. He’s seen it before, too many times.

Her eyes are blue.

When he drops her off, he pulls the cab around the corner and parks it. Radios in that he’s off the clock and where the cab is parked.

The night is hot and muggy, and Armando can feel his blood cooling to combat it. It weighs down on his skin, though, anyway.

He survives, but the world spins anyway, the world hurts, anyway.

—

The world shatters open on June 28, 1969. A shot glass on a mirror, a caterwauling battle cry for civil rights and civil unrest.

Alex is in the bar, still an overgrown street rat after all these years, but she (because sometimes, she is she) slips to the edges. As much as this is her fight, it also isn’t. The sway of her hips in women's jeans and high heels, the blouse sliding off her shoulder, they place her squarely here, but the other girls in this bar can’t burn holes through walls or slice clean through bronze.

She won’t make this about her. She’s gotten good at not being seen.

Out the door, down the street, away from the girls and the cops and the stones thrown by the innocent at the guilty, into a night so hot she could melt.

But she doesn’t.

She turns the corner almost at a run and crashes into someone.

She apologizes, looks him in the eye —

_Game over._

—

Of course he knows it’s Alex. Alex’s eyes, Alex’s jaw, Alex’s body language.

Who exactly Alex is tonight isn’t really as easy to determine. So Armando doesn’t, just catches Alex’s elbow instead. “…God, it’s been too long.”

Alex stares at him, blinks. “You — you’re dead. I saw you die.”

And Armando can’t help it, he just laughs.

—

She doesn’t know how she knows, but she knows he’s the real thing the second he touches her. She can’t help but say it, though. _I saw you die_. It’s code for _I killed you_ , and she knows he knows it.

And he laughs.

“Hotshot, I’m not dead.”   _It’s not your fault_.

The thing is, when he’s saying it, she believes it.

—

Armando puts a hand on Alex’s waist, intimate, overly familiar, but he’s always been that way with Alex. It comes instinctively to both of them and always has.

Alex exhales sharply. “You — where’ve you been?”

Armando grins, real joy bubbling up for the first time since he woke up. “Could ask the same for you, hotshot,” he says. “Man, it’s like 62 happened yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Alex says, nodding, stepping closer. “Shit, man, you’re — you’re really here.”

“Uh-huh,” he says, grinning and tugging Alex a little closer. “By the way, you look awful pretty in heels.”

—

Alex laughs, half-hysterical. She’d almost forgotten, in the fog of _Darwin’s back_ , that she’s a girl today. And he can see that, clearly.

But it doesn’t phase him — nothing ever seems to.

“Thanks,” she says, biting her lip.

Armando tracks the movement with his eyes, looking down a little bit with an intensity that should be unfamiliar but isn’t.

Alex thinks she can be forgiven, then, for swooping in and kissing him.

—

Armando gathers Alex in his arms like Alex has never been meant for anything else.

It feels perfect, his lips against Alex’s, his arms around Alex, as if the seven year gulf between tonight and that last night is just seven seconds long.

They’ve been waiting for this moment, and now, Armando is going to savor it.


End file.
